31 October 2011

When Siret Toots joined the kalmstrom.com team we did not only get an excellent Sales manager but also a much longed-for translator into Finnish.

Finnish software for Outlook +Exchange/SharePoint
Finland has many users of the kalmstrom.com Outlook add-ons, but so far the Finnish translation has not been up to date.
We are therefore happy to announce that new translations are on their way for all
our products. Hyvät Suomalaiset, olete tervetulleita kokeilemaan kalmstrom.com tuotteita Outlook + Exchange tai SharePoint! (Finns, you are very welcome to try the kalmstrom.com products for Outlook + Exchange or SharePoint!)

Resource booking in Outlook with Calendar Browser
The kalmstrom.com resource booking tool for Outlook was the first one to be fully translated, so the latest version of
Calendar Browser will be completely in Finnish for users with a Finnish Office. As Calendar Browser is a product that
may be used by a great number of clients, it was an important first step. When booking a room or a car from your Outlook calendar it feels better to have the add-on in the same language as Outlook, and the risk for mistakes is minimized.

Time reporting in Outlook with TimeCard
TimeCard is another kalmstrom.com product that may have many users. A number of big companies are Members of kalmstrom.com Community, and they let hundreds of employees report time and expenses directly from the Outlook calendar to
a central database. Siret has just finished the Finnish translation for TimeCard, and in the next release we will add the new phrases to this software. Also the Single version will be updated,
so that Finnish businesses of all sizes can use TimeCard in their own language.

All products will be updated for Finnish
One after one the kalmstrom.com products will be updated with a full Finnish version. I may not mention it here
in the blog every time, but it will certainly be included on the Revisions pages.
The kalmstrom.com team is looking forward to seeing more organizations from Finland joining kalmstrom.com Community!

27 October 2011

One of the steps that must be taken when releasing a new version of a product is to write a press release and submit it to a few good press release sites.
Now when both NameDays and iNameDays are updated for 2012, we also have new press releases for them.

News
In both press releases we of course mention the news: the name days for the year 2012 and the addition of the French name days. Earlier we covered only 2010 and 2011, so an upgrade to 2012 was necessary now that we are soon there. We are happy that we also could add the name days for France this time, and
it is our ambition to add more countries in future releases.

NameDays press release
The NameDays press release begins with a quote that expresses the delight people often feel when someone remembers their name day. This is something we hear a lot from grateful NameDays users.
We also mention that this free product can be used not only with Outlook but also with iCal, Yahoo! or Google Calendar.

iNameDays press release
In the
iNameDays press release we explain why the iNameDays icon has number 23 on it. The app that puts name days in the default calendar of iPad, iPod touch and iPad was the first app from kalmstrom.com Business Solutions, and even if you have to pay a small sum to get it from App Store it has become very popular.
There are more name days apps on the market, but as far as we know iNameDays is the only one that does not create a new calendar but instead puts the name days in the calendar people use for other notes and appointments.

For website visitors
The kalmstrom.com press releases are not only meant for the media but also for visitors to our website. They give a special kind of product presentation that we hope is interesting to read as a complement to our other documentation. It would be interesting to hear if we are right or wrong, so any comments are welcome!

26 October 2011

Yesterday kalmstrom.com Business Solutions had the pleasure of releasing a new version of NameDays, the
popular, free product that gives you name days in your calendar.

Name days for different calendars
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions markets Outlook add-ons for Office + Exchange/SharePoint, and also NameDays begun as an Outlook add-on. Nowadays we use ics files instead. That way NameDays will work on several kinds of calendars, like the Google and Mac OS X
calendars, and not only on with Outlook.

NameDays 2012 version with 14 languages
In the new version of NameDays the name days for 2012 are added, and on request we now also give the French name days. Year by year kalmstrom.com has added more countries to the list, so that we now can offer you 14 different name days files to choose from. For Swedish users we also have a file that gives Swedish week numbers in the calendar.

Get NameDays!
Welcome to subscribe to or import the NameDays file
‒ or files! ‒ of your choice. The procedure vary a bit for different kinds of calendars, but they are all easy. On the
kalmstrom.com website you can find video demonstrations that show exactly how to do it. NameDays is a gift from the kalmstrom.com team to all our website visitors. Please enjoy ‒ and tell your friends about it!

25 October 2011

The beautiful old woman
in the photo is my mother, Ingalill. Today is her name day, and as we consider Ingalill the kalmstrom.com Matriarch we are happy to give her a special gift for the iPad she uses every day:
the 2012 version of iNameDays, which was approved for release a few hours ago
‒ right on time!

iNameDays is an app you may
all share with Ingalill. It adds name days to the default iOS calendar, which is the calendar you normally use in your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch.
You don't have to create a separate calendar to see the name days of your choice. This year we have added the French name days, so now you have 14 name days (+ Swedish week numbers) to select from.

I have earlier
mentioned Ingalill's great interest for new technologies in the blog post post
"... 93 years old and loves her iPad".
Another interest is picking mushrooms, and in the photo she is preparing mushrooms she has herself picked in the woods. As you understand this spirited Matriarch is a great source of inspiration to the younger members of the kalmstrom.com clan! Our warm congratulations!

24 October 2011

Today is the first day of the important Hindu festival, Diwali or Deepawali.
The Indian employees of
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions will be off Wednesday and Thursday, but as usual we can always reach our dedicated lead developer Jayant. This is good to know, in case someone gets an urgent problem with one of the
kalmstrom.com Outlook add-ons that Sigge cannot manage
in the first line support.

Here kalmstrom.com developer Kanak Joshi will tell us more about the interesting rituals of the celebrations:

Diwali is a festival of colors and lights, and my family celebrates it with great enthusiasm. It is a five day festival, where each day has its own significance.
I will share with you how we celebrate each day of Diwali and what rituals are performed in my family.

Dhanteras
On this day, at sunset, my father worships dhan (wealth in form of gold /silver/cash etc.). Dhanteras is traditionally a day for purchase of precious metals.

Narak Chaturdasi
This day is also called “Choti (small) Diwali”. Everyone in my family massages the body with oil to relieve it of tiredness and bathe before sunrise. It is believed that if one bathes before sunrise, one will not go to “Narak" (hell).

Lakshmi Puja
On this third day everyone cleanse themselves and wear new clothes. We worship the Goddess Lakshmi to achieve the blessings of wealth and prosperity.
In the morning we make “Rangoli“, a decorative floor design with different colors, and in the evening we light clay lamps and burn crackers.

Padwa / Govardhan Puja
Some people also regard this day as the Hindu new year, so we visit our relative’s houses and wish everyone a happy and prosperous new year. We also worship the cow, who is considered as a mother in Hindu religion

Bhai Duj
The last day of Diwali is special for brothers and sisters. Therefore all my brothers come to my house, and we exchange gifts.

20 October 2011

22 December kalmstrom. com
CEO Peter will go to India and meet our employees in Indore. On the
way there he will also make a stop in Delhi to see
Gundeep Sachdev, head of the kalmstrom.com partner TimeRewards.

Last time Peter went to India it was for a wedding in November 2010.
kalmstrom.com Lead Developer Jayant Rimza got married, and the
celebrations and festivities were a great experience for Peter. This
time will be different ‒ all work and education!

Siret Toots will go with Peter to India, and while Peter and the developers are
studying she will go around looking at offices. She has already begun preparing this
with photos, floor plans and maps, to select the ones that are most interesting to kalmstrom.com.
We hope to find a really good new office for our growing team, a
place that has room for some more people also!

There will of course be time for getting together in a more
relaxed way too, and both Siret and Peter are looking forward to meeting the Indian staff "live" and getting to know them better.

18 October 2011

I am happy to announce that
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions has released a new version of
Calendar Browser, the popular resource booking application for Outlook. To book resources with Calendar Browser is meant to be as easy as creating an appointment in the Outlook calendar, and for most users it is. However, two organizations had problems with Calendar Browser and could not use the add-on as they wanted.
The kalmstrom.com team could solve the issues, and now we give the new version to all.

One Community Member wanted to use Calendar Browser on machines with multiple profiles installed on each PC, but that created difficulties in loading the calendars. With today’s version they can use Calendar Browser without problems.

The other Member had a lot of calendars full of recurring appointments, and that made the loading of the Overview very slow. We made the loading faster by making Calendar Browser load appointments from only a certain time to the Overview. By default the period is one month ahead, but each user can set the date range needed.

With today's update of Calendar Browser we have also taken another step to get rid of the dependency on Office Web Components, as they are no longer needed for the Example data.
Evaluators with later Outlook versions might not have them installed since Microsoft has chosen to not install them automatically.
Now these evaluators can create Example data without having to install OWC first. The integrated statistics tool still needs OWC, but we are working on that last part also.

Please refer to the
Revisions page for a full list of the
enhancements and bug fixes. Community Members have free
upgrades, as usual.

Are you looking for a resource booking tool that is easy to learn and manage? In that case I recommend you to try
Calendar Browser. I am sure you will like it and be yet another satisfied subscriber to a kalmstrom.com product.

14 October 2011

In August I blogged about the
unacceptable wrapping the cnet site Download.com had begun
practicing. They wrapped other downloads into installers, so when downloading from Download.com you could get unwanted programs that made changes to your computer and could be difficult to get rid of.

Product downloads from kalmstrom.com Business Solutions must NEVER give anything else than the clean and genuine software the downloader wants to try or use, so we decided to remove all our products from the cnet site.

After I had explained why we wanted to withdraw cnet's right to host our products, they were quickly taken away without further comments. However, today we got a "heartbreaking" e-mail from cnet: "We miss you
‒ please come back!"

In this impudent e-mail cnet tries to entice kalmstrom.com to return to Download.com, and their method is outright shameless: they offer us a chance to win hotel nights, a flight or entrance tickets to the International CES in Las Vegas! (Which by the way is free if you registered before 1 September.)
I feel both angry and ready to laugh at this ridiculous attempt.

We require a lot more than that to budge from our convictions. To give up our principles and let someone tamper with our installation files would be to give up kalmstrom.com!

13 October 2011

Today we congratulate our partner PamConsult GmbH who has released a new version of the
PamFax online fax service. kalmstrom.com CEO Peter was engaged in the design of the first version of this popular tool,
and he feels happy about the continued development of the product.

The lastest version of PamFax starts up a quicker and the screen appears much faster than before. All the PamFax platforms have this improved performance, as well Windows, OS X and Linux as the mobile apps for Android, iPad/iPhone and webOS.

I feel proud to announce that my PamFax translations into Swedish are now live. The PamFax homepage and the different applications are in Swedish, and I hope this will encourage more Swedes to try this cheap and excellent service.

11 October 2011

For
a long time I was the only woman in the kalmstrom.com team, but
during the last year no less than three other women have joined us. The latest one is our new QA Engineer Neha Gupta, who has been with
kalmstrom.com since the beginning of September.

Neha has passed both Bachelors of Science and Master of Computer Science exams. As she wants to use her skills as a tester, she finds work in the kalmstrom.com team
an
interesting challenge.

During the month Neha has been with us she has tested one app for iPhone (iCalendarTimeCard) and one for Android (ShareTask), checked changes in the kalmstrom.com resource booking tool for Outlook (Calendar Browser)
participated in planning of the new KBase and tested all products with Windows 8. All tasks have been performed with energy and skill, so you can understand we are happy to have her!

In her free time Neha plays badminton, and just like the kalmstrom.com CEO, Peter, she
very much enjoys music, drama and dance. But
‒ again just like Peter! ‒ her main interest is technology and everything you can achieve if you use it in a clever way. Welcome to the team, Neha!

06 October 2011

The day after Apple presented their new iPhone, I heard the sad news that Steve Jobs had
passed away. The news was given to me by kalmstrom.com Lead Deveoper Jayant Rimza together with a quote from eBay India: "You left a mark on our eyes, ears and fingers. RIP Steve Jobs."

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded Apple in 1976, after these two
visionaries had built the Apple 1 logic board in a garage and Jobs had sold his minibus to get startup money. The road has not been
smooth, but with Jobs as CEO, Apple has become one of the major
players in our business and an important competitor to Microsoft.

The reactions to Steve Jobs' death have been extensive. Politicians and company leaders as well as common users of the Apple products have
paid tribute to Steve Jobs, and people have gathered in Apple stores around the world. President Obama called the Apple cofounder one of America’s greatest innovators and praised him for having changed the way each of us sees the world.

Even though kalmstrom.com Business Solutions mostly develop for Microsoft
platforms, we are grateful for the existence of Apple. The rivalry between these two giants has given us all better products. Microsoft founder Bill Gates says about his friend: "The world rarely sees someone who has had the profound impact Steve has had, the effects of which will be felt for many generations to come."

05 October 2011

Yesterday Apple presented their next iPhone,
4S. On the surface it does not look so different from earlier versions, but underneath we find a faster and more powerful smart phone with a voice control feature, a new wireless system and a better camera.

Today only 5 % of all mobile phones are iPhones, but we think this figure will increase. Therefore kalmstrom.com Business Solutions develops apps for the iOS operating system
used in iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. We stick to areas that are interesting to our regular customers, and soon we will release the iPhone app iCalendarTimeCard.
With this app you can filter,
edit and create new appointments with assigned TimeCard categories and thus make them ready for report.

I am sure iCalendarTimeCard will be popular among TimeCard users who don't spend all their working time at the desk, and it will of course be free
to
Community Members and TimeCard SingelSupport customers!